Closing the Activation-Cone Blind Spot: Response-Time Probing and Unified Defense
arXiv:2606. 29441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists.
arXiv:2606. 02822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLM applications stack several defense families -- refusal-phrase filters, token-budget controls, model allowlists, rate limits, tool-registry authentication -- yet existing breach-and-attack-simulation (BAS) benchmarks report a single aggregate coverage number, hiding which family closes which threat.
arXiv:2606. 29441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists.
arXiv:2609.36570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection makes an LLM agent treat untrusted retrieved text as instructions. We present CounterSteer, an inference-time defense that...
Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists. We evaluate five defense paradigms (no defense, static steering, CAST, AlphaSteer, probe-gated) across seven instruction-tuned models (7-31B) and five attack types (GCG, AutoDAN, DeepInception, prefilling, intent laundering).
arXiv:2607. 01239v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Character-level perturbations bypass safety alignment in modern LLMs despite leaving prompts human-readable.
The paper introduces ‘Fool’s Gold’, a defensive deception technique for open‑weight language models that hardens them against safety‑removal attacks. By training decoy responses within a differentiable simulation of the attack, the method poisons the payoff of stripped refusal mechanisms, producing confident but falsified answers to hazardous requests while preserving benign behavior. Experiments on seven models (9B‑122B) show that 51‑90% of attacked‑state responses become decoys, with the defense accounting for 27‑84% of this effect, and that the defended 122B model remains within benign‑behavior budgets.
arXiv:2606. 05396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Producing a labeled vulnerable code at scale is a recurring obstacle for learning-based vulnerability detection: mined corpora carry substantial label noise, and existing LLM-based augmentation propagates these inaccuracies because it transforms vulnerable seeds rather than synthesising vulnerabilities from a specification.
arXiv:2605. 08442v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Persistent memory attacks against LLM agents achieve high attack success rates against open-source models.
arXiv:2606. 11686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where.
arXiv:2607. 20494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production LLM applications commonly stack a regex filter in front of model-side alignment; prior work found no measurable coverage gain from adding a live Gemini backend behind an active regex filter.
The paper investigates how allocating a query budget to structural depth rather than surface variation improves jailbreak success against the SAGE self‑check defense. By using a best‑of‑N approach over a code‑completion encoding, the authors achieve 67%, 22%, and 15% success rates on three open‑weight targets—far exceeding the 4.7% and 3.0% rates of single‑draw encoding and character‑search methods. The study demonstrates that depth of encoding and breadth of variation independently undermine transform and gate defenses, and that repeated sampling can inflate perceived robustness.
arXiv:2510. 01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings.
arXiv:2607. 19430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM applications chain a planner, worker agents, a verifier, and a synthesizer, and every hop between agents is an unmonitored channel through which an adversary can smuggle instructions.